What Is Improvement?

Abstract

What Is Improvement?The title of John Fea's The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Pennsylvania, 2008) calls to mind Raymond Williams's critique of improvement in rural England. Williams identifies two primary meanings of which were materially linked in consolidation of rural class structure during eighteenth century but could be morally dissociated.' Agricultural improvement, getting of more value from land through a program of enclosure, drainage, manuring, crop selection and rotation, and other yield-boosting technologies, supported social improvement manifested in a culture valuing taste and refinement. Cultivation bore a similar double sense, whose material connection has since become increasingly less visible as rural economy has all but disappeared from sight. Indeed, as Williams argues, moral claims of social improvement were turned against material structure of economic improvement, beginning in late eighteenth century with writings of William Cobbett and continuing through Victorian era. In United States, that critique was famously taken up by Henry David Thoreau, especially in Waiden, following a long England tradition of concern for improvement.Fea tells eighteenth-century American story of Philip Fithian's intellectual and social improvement not in order to examine its connection to and detachment from material improvement - taking these for granted much as Fithian himself seems to have done - but rather to illustrate some other large claims about nature of Enlightenment in continental North America. Fea's primary claim is that the Enlightenment was about self-improvement (5). This gives an entirely different focus from those studies of rural American Enlightenment that address question of modernity through agricultural improvement.2 Fea's focus on bourgeois social identity contrasts moreover with work that understands Enlightenment in terms of politics, literature, science, and public culture.3Philip Fithian lived in an American milieu in which material improvement supported substantial social improvement. Philip's great-grandfathers had migrated from England (one by way of Long Island) to take lands on Cohansey River, Jersey, in late seventeenth century. His grandfathers established themselves as gentleman famers: landowners who used laborers, sometimes including slaves, to work their lands. Philip's uncle Samuel Fithian, a first son, inherited largest portion of family estate to become one of wealthiest men in region, with holdings valued at over £1500. Philip's father Joseph, a third son, was a middling farmer who did not work his own lands but employed laborers as well as his sons. In this family culture, Philip had to work hard as a boy but aspired to status of gentleman. Improvement of land was especially evident in Cohansey in reclamation of salt marshes along Cohansey River through a system of banks and sluices. In addition to other seasonal farm work, Philip spent summers hauling mud and stones via canoe and wheelbarrow to .repair and extend banks, suffering mosquitoes and the ague. By age of twenty, and perhaps earlier, Philip was keeping a work journal in which he recorded weather and daily activities.As a first son, Philip stood to inherit his father's farm and with it his status as a gentleman. However, as Fea shows, a further path of social improvement opened to him within religious culture of Cohansey. Led by ministers of four local Presbyterian churches, Cohansey experienced something of a religious awakening during 1760s, whose sources Fea traces to a denominational reinvigoration following reconciliation in 1758 of Great Awakening split between New Side evangelicals and Old Side conservatives. Experiencing a conversion in 1766, Philip felt he might be called to ministry and, although reluctant to leave family estate and Cohansey community, he set about persuading his father to send him to College of Jersey (which would soon become Princeton University). …